Cone Mills Corporation was a twentieth-century
manufacturer
Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to ...
of
cotton
Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective case, around the seeds of the cotton plants of the genus '' Gossypium'' in the mallow family Malvaceae. The fiber is almost pure cellulose, and can contain minor pe ...
fabrics that included
corduroy
Corduroy is a textile with a distinctively raised "cord" or wale texture. Modern corduroy is most commonly composed of tufted cords, sometimes exhibiting a channel (bare to the base fabric) between them. Both velvet and corduroy derive from fu ...
,
flannel
Flannel is a soft woven fabric, of various fineness. Flannel was originally made from carded wool or worsted yarn, but is now often made from either wool, cotton, or synthetic fiber. Flannel is commonly used to make tartan clothing, blankets, ...
, and
denim
Denim is a sturdy cotton warp-faced textile in which the weft passes under two or more warp threads. This twill weaving produces a diagonal ribbing that distinguishes it from cotton duck. While a denim predecessor known as dungaree has been p ...
. The company headquartered in
Greensboro, North Carolina
Greensboro (; formerly Greensborough) is a city in and the county seat of Guilford County, North Carolina, United States. It is the List of municipalities in North Carolina, third-most populous city in North Carolina after Charlotte, North Car ...
and had its factory mills in parts of
North
North is one of the four compass points or cardinal directions. It is the opposite of south and is perpendicular to east and west. ''North'' is a noun, adjective, or adverb indicating direction or geography.
Etymology
The word ''north ...
and
South Carolina
)'' Animis opibusque parati'' ( for, , Latin, Prepared in mind and resources, links=no)
, anthem = " Carolina";" South Carolina On My Mind"
, Former = Province of South Carolina
, seat = Columbia
, LargestCity = Charleston
, LargestMetro = ...
. The company has its roots in a family-operated
Baltimore
Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the List of municipalities in Maryland, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, and List of United States cities by popula ...
grocery business that was managed mostly by
Moses H. Cone and his brother Caesar.
Cone Mills acquired several mills in the
Southern United States
The Southern United States (sometimes Dixie, also referred to as the Southern States, the American South, the Southland, or simply the South) is a geographic and cultural region of the United States of America. It is between the Atlantic Ocean ...
that produced various fabrics. The companies they accumulated turned into a corporation; in its prime, it was the world's largest maker of denim fabric. Cone family members associated with Moses and Caesar became wealthy because of the corporation. The company was involved with civil and community projects and sponsored programs that required clothing, such as the
Miss North Carolina Pageant.
Cone Mills built five self-sufficient villages to serve its Greensboro factory workers. The villages, featuring boarding houses and single-family homes, included churches, schools, baseball fields, community centers, and company stores in addition to houses leased to mill workers. At their peak, the Cone Mills villages covered hundreds of acres and housed thousands of workers in some 1,500 houses. The corporation hired nurses, established night schools, had schools for children, gave land for church construction, and had their own
YMCA
YMCA, sometimes regionally called the Y, is a worldwide youth organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, with more than 64 million beneficiaries in 120 countries. It was founded on 6 June 1844 by George Williams (philanthropist), Georg ...
. Their company stores sold their own products that were produced on their own farms.
The corporation was disestablished in 2004 following a bankruptcy proceeding. In 2017, the Cone Mills' last large-scale denim mill was shut down in the United States, meaning American-made selvedge denim was no longer available.
Early history
The history of the Cone Mills Corporation had its beginnings in 1845 after Herman Kahn (1828–1897), a
Jewish-German
The history of the Jews in Germany goes back at least to the year 321, and continued through the Early Middle Ages (5th to 10th centuries CE) and High Middle Ages (''circa'' 1000–1299 CE) when Jewish immigrants founded the Ashkenazi Jewish ...
immigrant, and his sister's family left their home in
Bavaria
Bavaria ( ; ), officially the Free State of Bavaria (german: Freistaat Bayern, link=no ), is a state in the south-east of Germany. With an area of , Bavaria is the largest German state by land area, comprising roughly a fifth of the total lan ...
for a new life in the United States. Almost immediately upon arriving in the country, Herman changed the spelling of his surname from Kahn to Cone, thinking it a "more American spelling",
as "Cone" had been a surname known in America as early as 1657. Herman Cone and his brother-in-law Jacob Adler started a
dry goods
Dry goods is a historic term describing the type of product line a store carries, which differs by region. The term comes from the textile trade, and the shops appear to have spread with the mercantile trade across the British Empire (and forme ...
business in the German-speaking
Pennsylvania Dutch town of
Jonesboro, Tennessee
Jonesborough (historically also Jonesboro) is a town in, and the county seat of, Washington County, Tennessee, in the Southeastern United States. Its population was 5,860 as of 2020. It is "Tennessee's oldest town".
Jonesborough is part of the Jo ...
. Cone & Adler sold the usual items like groceries, hats, boots, and shoes, though exceptionally they also sold ready-to-wear clothing, unusual in the
antebellum South where most clothing was made at home.
Cone met Helen Guggenheimer (1838–1898) on one of his business trips to
Lynchburg, Virginia, in the early part of the 1850s. She was also a German Jew. They married in 1856 when she was eighteen. Their first child was
Moses H. Cone, born in 1857, founder of Proximity Manufacturing Company (the original name for the Cone Mills
enterprises). Their next child was Caesar, born in 1859, the co-founder. The family showed in the
pre-Civil War 1860 census that their real estate holdings and personal property holdings were an impressive $29,365 (). By 1861 they closed their business because of the war and invested their money into real estate instead. At the end of the war, the family sold some of their real estate to reopen their retail business under the name Adler, Cone, and Shipley.
The new business engaged in the
barter
In trade, barter (derived from ''baretor'') is a system of exchange in which participants in a transaction directly exchange goods or services for other goods or services without using a medium of exchange, such as money. Economists disti ...
system to trade goods, since cash was then scarce. They traded their goods for textiles and then resold these in the
South for cash. On many occasions they took credit secured by personal property and land. Later they legally redeemed property on many of the cash debts owed them by the debtors and by default had seized and collected hundreds of acres of real estate. By 1870, the family was wealthy because of the real estate they had acquired.
The Cone family moved to
Baltimore, Maryland
Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the List of municipalities in Maryland, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, and List of United States cities by popula ...
, and started a wholesale grocery business called Guggenheimer, Cone & Company. The family now included seven children: five boys and two girls, Claribel and Etta, who later gained a reputation as the art-collecting
Cone sisters. This wholesale grocery business, owned by several relatives, was ultimately disbanded in 1873, and Herman went into business with his eldest sons, Moses and Caesar. This new firm was called H. Cone & Sons. The two brothers worked with their father in his grocery business while in their teens, traveling the southern and eastern parts of the United States as drummers (traveling salesmen). They took and bartered orders from southern merchants for their father's
wares. The business had included tobacco and leather goods by 1875.
![Interior of a cotton mill 1909](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Interior_of_a_cotton_mill_1909.jpg)
Moses and Caesar Cone in 1887 invested in the C. E. Graham Mill Company, which manufactured cotton
plaids in
Asheville, North Carolina. In 1893, the company became the Asheville Cotton Mills. In 1888, the brothers bought part of the Salisbury Cotton manufacturing factories in
Salisbury, North Carolina. They also invested in the Minneola Manufacturing Company in
Gibsonville, North Carolina
Gibsonville ("City of Roses") is a town in both Alamance and Guilford counties in the U.S. state of North Carolina. Most of Gibsonville is situated in the Greensboro-Winston-Salem- High Point Combined Statistical Area and the eastern portion is in ...
. Moses and Caesar Cone formed the Cone Export & Commission brokerage company in 1891. The selling agent for the textile companies in the southern United States was called a "plaid trust" by its competitors.
The company's headquarters were in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...
while it was chartered in New Jersey and Moses served as its president. In 1893, the Cone brothers built a pioneering textile
finishing plant in the southern part of the United States and called it the Southern Finishing & Warehouse Company. Moses built his first denim manufacturing plant in Greensboro in 1895 called the Proximity Cotton Mills because of its location to the nearby cotton fields.
Near the mills, Moses and Caesar built a facility to serve as the company's headquarters. Caesar was its first president.
The Cone family, many of whom were later connected with Moses and Caesar's enterprises and became wealthy, included Carrie (1861–1927), Monroe (1862–1891), Claribel (1864–1929), Albert (1866–1867), Solomon (1868–1939), Sydney M. (1869–1939), Etta (1870–1949), Julius W. (1872–1940), Bernard M. (1874–1956), Clarence N. (1876–1929), and Frederick W. (1878-1944).
Turn of the century
![White Oak Mills Greensboro NC 1909](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/White_Oak_Mills_Greensboro_NC_1909.jpg)
In 1899, Moses and Caesar formed a partnership with Emanuel Sternberger and his brother Herman to construct a
flannel
Flannel is a soft woven fabric, of various fineness. Flannel was originally made from carded wool or worsted yarn, but is now often made from either wool, cotton, or synthetic fiber. Flannel is commonly used to make tartan clothing, blankets, ...
production plant called Revolution Mills that would be located in South Carolina. The Cone brothers constructed White Oak Cotton Mills in Greensboro in 1905. By 1908 it had become the world's largest denim manufacturer.
The heavy-duty blue denim fabric produced by the mills managed by Moses ultimately gave him the title "Denim King". From 1915 until the plant closed in 2017, Cone Mills produced the denim fabric that
Levi Strauss & Company
Levi Strauss & Co. () is an American clothing company known worldwide for its Levi's () brand of denim jeans. It was founded in May 1853 when German-Jewish immigrant Levi Strauss moved from Buttenheim, Bavaria, to San Francisco, California, to ...
used exclusively in their 501 brand jeans.
The company opened Proximity Printing Works in 1912.
This plant was one of the earliest color cloth printing factories in the southern United States. In 1927, the company acquired Cliffside Cotton Mills, a manufacturer of
terry cloth
Terrycloth, terry cloth, terry cotton, terry toweling, terry, terry towel, or simply toweling is a fabric woven with many protruding loops of thread which can absorb large amounts of water. It can be manufactured by weaving or knitting. Terryclo ...
, and Haynes Plant, which produced
chambray
Chambray () is a commune in the Eure department of northern France, 13 km northeast of Évreux on the north bank of the river Eure.
The Château de Chambray, in the north of the commune, is the ancestral home of the Marquis de Venevelles ...
. By 1929 they had acquired the Holt-Granite Puritan factory of
Haw River, North Carolina
Haw River is a town in Alamance County, North Carolina, United States. It is part of the Burlington, North Carolina Metropolitan Statistical Area. As of the 2010 census the population was 2,298.
Geography
Haw River is located at . It is bordere ...
. They then acquired the
corduroy
Corduroy is a textile with a distinctively raised "cord" or wale texture. Modern corduroy is most commonly composed of tufted cords, sometimes exhibiting a channel (bare to the base fabric) between them. Both velvet and corduroy derive from fu ...
-producing Tabardrey Manufacturing Company, founded by Sidney Small Paine and named for his children, Tad, Barbara and Audrey. By 1932 the Cone company had most of the ownership of Eno Cotton Mills company located in
Hillsborough, North Carolina
The town of Hillsborough is the county seat of Orange County, North Carolina, United States and is located along the Eno River. The population was 6,087 in 2010, but it grew rapidly to 9,660 by 2020.
Its name was unofficially shortened to "Hills ...
.
The recession of 19371938 forced Cone Mills in North Carolina to cut wages by 12.5 percent in the summer of 1938. They purchased the Florence factory mills of
Forest City, North Carolina
Forest City, formerly known as "Burnt Chimney," is a town in Rutherford County, North Carolina, United States. The population was 7,377 as of the 2020 census, making it the largest municipality in Rutherford County.
History
The Alexander Manufa ...
, in 1941 and also its subsidiary called
American Spinning No. 2 of
Greenville, South Carolina.
Mergers and reorganization
The company merged all of its separate mill factory properties into Proximity Manufacturing Company by 1945. The manufacturing companies and mills owned by the Cones were restructured so that the individual business operations of the Proximity Manufacturing Company, the Cliffside Mills, the Florence Mills, the Minneola Manufacturing Company, the Salisbury Cotton mill factories, the Tabardrey Manufacturing Company, and the Cone Export & Commission Company, were all reorganized. Then, by 1948, another merger occurred where the Revolution Mills group and Proximity Manufacturing were consolidated and named Cone Mills Corporation. In 1950, the company announced a merger with the twill and drill manufacturer Dwight Manufacturing of Alabama. The following year it purchased the company outright. In 1951, the corporation went public, selling capital assets on the
stock exchange at New York City. In April 1951, a strike involved 55 percent of the Cone Mills unionized workforce; the Dwight mill was completely shut down, whereas the others in the Cone chain continued to operate at various capacities. Cone Mills purchased the Union Bleachery of Greenville, South Carolina, in 1952. They obtained the first license in the United States for the
sanforizing treatment to prevent fabric from shrinking.
Company villages and other associations
![Cone Memorial YMCA](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Cone_Memorial_YMCA.jpg)
Mill villages were company-owned villages constructed from scratch to house Cone Mills factory workers' families. In the early twentieth century Cone Mills built five self-sufficient villages to serve its Greensboro factory workers. They included churches, schools, baseball fields, community centers, and company stores in addition to houses leased to mill workers. At their peak, the Cone mill villages covered and housed 2,675 workers in about 1,500 houses. It was the second largest mill community in the state, behind
Cannon Mills
The Cannon Mills Company was an American textile manufacturing company based in Kannapolis, North Carolina, that mainly
produced towels and bed sheets. Founded in 1887 by James William Cannon, by 1914 the company was the largest towel and shee ...
'
Kannapolis
Kannapolis () is a city in Cabarrus and Rowan counties, in the U.S. state of North Carolina, northwest of Concord and northeast of Charlotte and is a suburb in the Charlotte metropolitan area. The city of Kannapolis was incorporated in 1984. Th ...
. Though incorporated into the city of Greensboro in 1923, the mill community lived largely separate lives from other city residents for decades. East White Oak mill village housed
African American
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...
workers. There were thousands of workers' families that lived in these villages contained within a town until the company began selling off the houses to the public and their workers in the 1940s. African American workers in East White Oak could, "until the 1960s, ... hold only the most menial jobs in the factories, often custodial".
The Cone Mills Corporation was well known for the first three decades of the twentieth-first century for their compassionate administration of their mill villages for their workers. The company was involved with their employees housing, schools, churches, stores, and recreational events. It hired nurses and established a night school, Camp Herman, and the Cone Memorial YMCA. The Cone Mills Corporation built both boarding houses and single-family homes near their mills. Their company stores sold their own dairy merchandise and meat products that was produced on the company farms. The company constructed a school for children and gave land for church construction in each village. The company also made available a Welfare Office to assist the employees.
In 1944, an informal agreement between the company and the Greensboro city council dating to the villages' incorporation into the municipality allowing Cone Mills to pick the candidates for one of the council seats ended. Greensboro's social services were expanded into the villages, and the city assumed the responsibilities for law enforcement, garbage collection, and road maintenance in the area. It took over the mill schools and erected the community's first streetlights.
The company was also associated with the Cone Country Club and endowed
Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital in Greensboro. From 1958 to 1969, they were participants with the yearly
Miss North Carolina Pageant. Cone's factories furnished fabric for wardrobes that each year's winner wore. They also provided fabric for the presentation gown for each winner so they could exhibit North Carolina in the yearly
Miss America Pageant
Miss America is an annual competition that is open to women from the United States between the ages of 17 and 25. Originating in 1921 as a "bathing beauty revue", the contest is now judged on competitors' talent performances and interviews. As ...
.
Closure and legacy
The textile companies and factories owned by the Cone family were: Revolution Cotton industries, Asheville Cotton shops, Minneola Manufacturing association, Salisbury Cotton congregation, Cliffside assemblies, Eno Cotton community, Granite Finishing, Tabardrey Manufacturing, Florence team, John Wolf Textiles, Olympic Products, and American Spinning group.
In 1983, Western Pacific Industries attempted a takeover of the firm after a deal to acquire shares from Caesar Cone II.
At the time, the company had 21 plants and 10,800 employees and was valued at $385 million. The deal was thwarted by a
leveraged buyout
A leveraged buyout (LBO) is one company's acquisition of another company using a significant amount of borrowed money ( leverage) to meet the cost of acquisition. The assets of the company being acquired are often used as collateral for the loa ...
by 47 members of management, after which the company made several cutbacks.
Among the measures taken was the sale of the former Union Bleaching facility in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1984; the plant burned down in 2003 and was declared a
Superfund site. It was not the first time Cone Mills's environmental practices had come under scrutiny. In 1977, the
Environmental Protection Agency sued, claiming the firm had violated an order by continuing to pollute a creek with residues from its Proximity mill in Greensboro;
in response, Cone Mills shut it down and laid off 600 workers.
Lawsuits about the buyout lingered into the 1990s.
Debt refinancing from the 1984 buyout continued as late as 1992, when the company offered shares to the public and obtained new loans.
The 1990s and early 2000s saw a series of closures of manufacturing facilities owned by Cone Mills. 380 of the 500 workers at its Haw River, North Carolina, operation, were laid off in 1992 due to lower demand for corduroy; the plant itself shuttered in 1997, with dyeing and finishing operations centralized in
Carlisle, South Carolina
Carlisle is a town in Union County, South Carolina, United States. The population was 436 according to the 2010 United States Census.
History
The community was named after Coleman Carlisle, a Methodist minister.
Hillside and Woodland Plantati ...
.
The firm closed its operation at Salisbury, North Carolina, in 1999, citing additional overseas fabric imports and years of heavy losses; the Salisbury mill had been in business since 1888.
In 2000, the Raytex plant at
Marion, South Carolina
Marion is a city in and the county seat of Marion County, South Carolina, United States. It is named for Francis Marion, a brigadier general from South Carolina in the American Revolutionary War. The population was 6,939 at the 2010 census.
Histo ...
, was closed, taking with it 200 jobs, as demand for comforters and bedspreads declined.
Among the few new ventures started was a joint venture with Compañía Industrial de Parras to build a fabric plant in Mexico.
Weakened by foreign competition and lower consumption of denim,
The Cone Mills Corporation in 2003 filed for
Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Two of the company's three facilities in
Rutherford County, North Carolina, were then shuttered, resulting in the loss of 625 jobs.
By 2004,
WL Ross & Co
WL Ross & Co is a private equity company founded and based in New York by Wilbur Ross in April 2000. The company focuses on investments in financially distressed companies with undervalued stocks, in the $100 to $200 million range, usually in the ...
had acquired all of Cone's assets, which were merged with what was left of
Burlington Industries
Burlington Industries, formerly Burlington Mills, is a diversified American fabric maker based in Greensboro, North Carolina. Founded by J. Spencer Love in Burlington, North Carolina in 1923, the company has operations in the United States, Mexi ...
to create the
International Textile Group.
Closure of the White Oak mill
International Textile Group, the parent company for Cone Denim, announced in 2017 that, after more than one hundred years of production, its White Oak factory mill in
Greensboro
Greensboro (; formerly Greensborough) is a city in and the county seat of Guilford County, North Carolina, United States. It is the List of municipalities in North Carolina, third-most populous city in North Carolina after Charlotte, North Car ...
would cease operations. The company worked with its White Oak purchasers to fulfill existing orders and transitioned styles to its ten manufacturing factories in the United States, Mexico, and Asia. International Textile Group continues to have their offices in Greensboro. When the mill closed, it was the last large-scale denim mill to shut down in the US, meaning American-made selvedge denim was no longer available. Some of the last denim produced at White Oak was given to the artist
Ian Berry, who is known for his work with denim, to make the ''Secret Garden'' installation at the
Children's Museum of Arts in New York. International Textile Group transformed into Elevate Textiles (a component of
Platinum Equity
Platinum Equity, LLC is an American private equity investment firm founded by Tom Gores in 1995. The firm focuses on leveraged buyout investments of established companies in the U.S., Europe and Asia.
History
Platinum Equity was founded in 199 ...
) in January 2019, remaining the parent corporation of Cone Denim.
References
Sources
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
{{Authority control
Textile companies of the United States
Companies based in Greensboro, North Carolina
Manufacturing companies established in 1895
Cone family
Manufacturing companies disestablished in 2004
Cotton production
1895 establishments in North Carolina
2004 disestablishments in North Carolina